On Friday 27 February, Big Think partner PwC hosted its second global webcast focused on the question, ‘What would you do if you were not afraid?’ The webcast was part of ‘Aspire to Lead: The PwC Women’s...

Designers of the new federal system for sending emergency alerts to our cell phones devoted at lot attention to setting up the technical aspects, but not enough to figuring out what the messages should say....

Ray Kurzweil: The Nanotech Revolution will Bring Immortality

If you stay healthy long enough to reap the benefits of the biotech revolution, Ray Kurzweil says, you can hope to live long enough to see the nanotechnology revolution. At that point, Kurzweil tells the Canadian magazine Macleans, you can augment your immune system with robots.

Kurzweil has written two books on health and technology, but in this interview he answered two common questions about his idea of humans achieving radical longevity.

Kurzweil says:

People say, “I don’t want to live like a typical 95-year-old for hundreds of years.” But the goal is not just to extend life. The idea is to stay healthy and vital, and not only to have life extension, but life expansion.

But if life expansion becomes achievable, the question still remains whether it will be accessible for everyone, as opposed to just the super rich. Kurzweil points to the example of the cell phone:

You had to be rich to have a mobile phone 20 years ago. And it was the size and weight of a brick, and it didn’t work very well. Today there are seven billion cellphones, there’s over one billion smartphones, and there will be six or seven billion smartphones in a few years. Today you can buy an Android phone or iPhone that’s twice as good as the one two years ago, for half the price. It is only the rich that can afford [these technologies] at an early point, when they don’t work. By the time they work a little bit, they’re affordable; by the time they work really well, they’re almost free. And that will be true of these health technologies.